The Uncommon Reader

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett is an often funny story about what it means to be a reader. It’s a tale of how the Queen of England stumbles upon a traveling library, takes out a book in a mistaken effort to be polite, and gets hooked on reading. She is guided in her early choices by a gay boy who works in her kitchen and who just happened to be at the library. He knows very little about literature and he prefers to read gay books; so those are the books he recommends to her. She elevates him from the kitchen to her personal assistant for running errands to the library and as someone she can freely talk to about books. Eventually she begins to make her own choices, her advisors arrange to get rid of her assistant, and she finds herself alone in her reading. Her advisors, who think they have regained control over the Queen, discover that she has developed a mind of her own. It’s a very short book, only 120 small pages, and quite delightful.